Alabama

Volunteers count homeless in Baldwin County

(Guy Busby, Press-Register)Connie Plemmons of Catholic Social Services, second from left, talks to volunteers returning from the annual Point in Time survey of Baldwin County homeless residents. The count was conducted Thursday and Friday as part of a national study. ROBERTSDALE, Ala. -- Baldwin County has homeless residents, but living hidden away in cars, tents and sheds, these people are not easy to find, volunteers discovered in the last week.

In the annual Point in Time count conducted Thursday and Friday, about 40 Baldwin volunteers followed trails to reported campsites in the woods and called hospitals, jails and shelters in an effort to determine how many people were homeless in the county in one 24-hour period. The survey is part of a nationwide effort to count the homeless that takes place on the same day each year.

Connie Plemmons of Catholic Social Services, one of the organizers of the Baldwin survey, said the count went well.

"We had about 25 interviews and that's a preliminary number," she said. "There were a lot more of what we call sightings, people walking up on campsites and evidence of people being there, but no one was there at the time."

She said volunteers are still gathering numbers on people in shelters and other locations.

Information from the count helps federal officials determine how to distribute money intended for programs that help the homeless, Plemmons said. She said Baldwin County has homeless residents, but those people are not as obvious as in urban areas.

"The sad thing is that they're afraid and they don't want to be seen," Plemmons told one group of searchers, who had reported finding signs of people living in a wooded area in south Baldwin County.

Volunteer Jeffrey Schlauder said he was surprised to find indications that people were homeless near his hometown of Elberta.

"We have homeless people, but people don't think about it," he said. "I'm happy to have the experience of trying to help, but I wish we could have found some of them."

Schlauder, a Faulkner State Community College student, said his group found a blanket under a bridge in Lillian that appeared to have been left by someone sleeping at the site.

Stephen Wenzel of Elsanor, also a Faulkner student on a separate survey team, said he was surprised by the conditions his group found. One man appeared to have been living in a broken down trailer on a site covered in trash.

"You could kind of see inside the trailer, because it had no door and it just looked like some clothes they found were laid out for a bed," Wenzel said. He said the people neighbors had said lived at the site had left before they arrived. The team left several bags of items at the site.

Plemmons said teams are given plastic bags filled with donated items, such as socks, soap, bottled water, toothbrushes and other necessities to provide assistance to any homeless people they meet. The bags also contain lists of local community service agencies where the homeless people can find help.

Survey team members do not record the names of the homeless or where they are living, but try to determine numbers and other information, such as how many men, women and children are among the homeless.

In 2009, the survey found 45 people who were not in shelters in Baldwin County. In 2008, 21 people were found in the same study.